Day in Engineering History Archive - May 20

May 20

1874: Levi Strauss received a patent for making blue jeans with copper rivets. 1895: Reginald Mitchell, designer of the famous Spitfire airplane that beat back the German Luftwaffe in WWII, was born. 1901: Hideo Shima, Japanese designer of the world's first "bullet train," was born. 1913: William R. (Bill) Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett Packard, was born. 1921: Marie Curie was presented with a gram of radium worth $100k at the White House. 1927: Charles Lindbergh took off from New York to cross the Atlantic for Paris aboard his airplane the "Spirit of St. Louis" (a 33-1/2 hour flight). 1932: Amelia Earhart took off to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, becoming the first woman to achieve the feat. 1940: Igor Sikorsky demonstrated his helicopter to the public. 1956: The first hydrogen fusion bomb (H-bomb) to be dropped from an airplane exploded over Namu Atoll at the northwest edge of the Bikini Atoll. 1982: Merle Tuve who first used pulsed radio waves to explore the ionosphere, died. 1990: The Hubble Space Telescope sent its first photograph from space. 2012:  1915: Eugene Polley, inventor of the TV remote, died.

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Note: These historical tidbits have been collected from various sources, mostly on the Internet. As detailed in this article, there is a lot of wrong information that is repeated hundreds of times because most websites do not validate with authoritative sources. On RF Cafe, events with hyperlinks have been verified. Many years ago, I began commemorating the birthdays of notable people and events with special RF Cafe logos. Where available, I like to use images from postage stamps from the country where the person or event occurred. Images used in the logos are often from open source websites like Wikipedia, and are specifically credited with a hyperlink back to the source where possible. Fair Use laws permit small samples of copyrighted content.